Information-Centric Networks (ICNs) place the content as the narrow waist of the networking architecture, and perform routing based upon the content and not based upon node addresses as in Internet protocol (IP) networks. These ICN architectures also allow for the routers to transparently store content in a memory attached to the router.
Both routing on content, and the multiplication of potential locations for the stored content enabled by ICNs, make the routing more challenging in ICNs. While a typical router today while contain about 400,000 prefix entries in its route table, content routing increases this amount by several order of magnitudes. Thus, new tools and protocols to exchange routing information in a scalable and efficient manner are desirable.